paintings and artist’s prints by Martin Dace

This is based on a miniature in the Wallace Collection of the Muse Euterpe by Jacques Charlier, after another painting by Boucher. My version is a lino print. I have chosen this medium because everything depends on simple lines. There is no fudging possible. In addition I have chosen to print in one colour only. The image either works or it doesn’t.

The Muse Euterpe after Charlier after Boucher

Immediately above is the first attempt at printing. As you can see there is a problem with the inking, largely because I am using a brayer that used to belong to my mother when she was at art school in the year dot, so the roller is too hard.

There are some areas of vegetation that do not make sense and even suggest bats which are not intended to be part of the picture, so some further cutting is necessary.

Below is the sketch of the design. I drew with pencil directly onto the lino, then inked over the lines I wanted to keep.

sharp definition is possible, and it doesn’t require as much force to cut as proper artists’ lino. The drawback, however, is that material cut away does not easily break off, as it does with ordinary lino, so that a line of PVC is left attached at one end. It is then necessary to use a flat blade to cut the attached end. This is sometimes trickier than it sounds.

With regular artists’ lino, at the end of a cut a simple upward pull with the cutting tool or fingers is sufficient to break off the piece to be removed.

On the other hand, regular artists’ lino can get hard and the effort to cut it can reduce control. Lino gets harder with age so newer lino will be easier to work with. A common trick is to run an iron over it to warm it up before carving, but this needs to be done repeatedly and tends to interrupt the flow of the work. I have found that using better cutting tools is the best answer, as shown below. (These are Japanese woodcarving tools. The Swann Morton scalpel you can just about see is not included in the set.)

My latest print is yet another mermaid. Why mermaids? My excuse is that they are not only beautiful, echoing as they do the female form (and actually no further excuse is really required), but also symbolise the ability to move between two different worlds.

A mermaid can see fish but she realises at the same time that she is not a fish. Similarly we can (with practice) see out own thoughts and realise we are not those thoughts. We can become aware of the water.

This I scanned into the computer and then printed out again on tracing paper. Using a soft pencil (4B, but 6B would be better) I traced over the lines on the front of the image and then turned it over onto the lino. By going over the same lines again using a hard (H) pencil the pencil marks were transferred to the lino.

This produces a reversed image on the lino so that the final print will be the same way round as the original sketch.

This works well on pale soft lino. (I shall have further comments to make about this product in a later post.) Darker lino might require the use of chalk or soft pastel instead of soft pencil to transfer the image. The lines can be inked over for better clarity and also to modify the drawing if this is desired.

The photograph below shows the soft lino block marked up and mostly already cut. As you can see I used a cutting board to reduce hazards both to the table top and to my fingers. The cutting tools are Japanese wood block tools for softwood and are far superior to the usual lino cutting tools (more on tools later).

Mermaid lino cut in progress

Below is the set-up for printing. I am using an inking tray from Amazon although a piece of thick glass would do. A flexible palette knife is handy for spreading the ink. In this case I am using water-soluble printing ink. TIP: if using water-soluble ink, clean both the surface of the lino and the brayer (ink roller) with soap and water or with alcohol because greasy fingerprints will stop the ink from taking.

Set-up for lino printing

Next place your paper over the image. I used tracing paper for the first print and used the back of a spoon to rub the back of the paper in order to transfer the image to the paper. If you are using opaque paper you can still check the progress of your work by carefully lifting a corner of the paper – as long as you don’t lift too much you will not affect the registration of the image. You could also use a press but then you will have to do many experiments to get the pressure just right.

Checking the print

As you can see below, the first impression showed up many small areas which should have been cut away. Since these areas take up the ink it is easy to see where corrections are necessary.

Mermaid lino print first impression showing errors

Here is the final image, available printed on tracing paper or opaque white paper in a signed limited edition of 30:

This is the design for the frontispiece of Sir Henry Herring’s book, S. Doris Iland and Divers Marvells found therein as described in Milton Marmalade‘s masterpiece, A Mermaid in the Bath.

A mermaid irrupts into the previously humdrum life of our hero Lionel, and almost as quickly is captured by the local police acting for an unseen master villain. During his quest to rescue her, Lionel finds an old book dating from the 16th century, purporting to be an account by one of the voyagers on Drake’s ship the Golden Hinde of the discovery of St Doris Island, a previously unknown volcanic island in the Caribbean. A fact not recorded in Hakluyt‘s version, for reasons that are probably fairly obvious, is that the original inhabitants of the island turned out to be mermaids (and for all we know, still are, since St Doris Island was lost to naval charts for reasons explained in the book).

In any event, Milton Marmalade asked me to reproduce as best I may the frontispiece to Sir Henry Herring’s book which he claims to possess but has mislaid, so all I have to go on is the description in A Mermaid in the Bath. I have tried to emulate the sometimes crude but equally delightful style of 16th century woodcuts, although I have used lino. You can get your very own limited-edition artist’s print from my Etsy store.

In the picture you can see, as described, on one side Drake’s Golden Hinde at anchor together with a traditional sea monster (and it is left to the reader to decide whether that is somehow symbolic of the threat to gentle people everywhere of colonialist expansion) and on the other, St Doris Island and its volcano fringed with palm trees, together with frolicking flying fishes (and the reader may or may not surmise symbolism here too).

In the centre is, as also described, a triumphantly naked mermaid. The print is on acid-free tracing paper, which when mounted on a white background makes a luminous impression. Also tracing paper is smooth and takes the ink well, leaving a sharp image (sharper in fact than the above photograph suggests). The size of the paper is A3 and the size of the image is approximately A4 (8.3×11.7 inches which is 210x297mm). There will be no more than 30 signed and numbered in addition to the artist’s proof.

I abandoned WordPress because setting it up properly is a bit of a rigmarole. But nothing really good happens without a bit of effort, and WordPress allows me to showcase my work better. So I’m coming back.

While you wait for my serious work I am posting this cartoon I did about 30 years ago. It’s still topical today, although the fault lies not with the hard-pressed and increasingly scarce psychiatrists but with the government and with all those who do not want to pay proper taxes to fund a proper system (Google and Amazon I’m looking at you).